Thursday, October 4, 2012

Chapter Six of Sondra's Search: Finding a lost Torah scroll can be as difficult as finding yourself.

Chapter Six

Once in ninth grade, Sondra remembered
what Oscar had told her about his high school years at Lincoln High. “Everyone
spoke English too fast for me to understand, and what they did speak about was
all nonsense. Nothing about learning-just parties and football games.”
Sometimes it seemed to Sondra that classes were not important to anyone. Howie
did not mind. He was on the football team and was trying out for the swim team.
He also ran for student council and became one of the two representatives from
the ninth grade class. Almost every Friday night there were dances or sock hops
after the football games, and Howie decided they were more important than the
monthly Shabbat services at the university chapel. A new fad cropped up at the
high school. Boys would give their ID bracelets, with their names engraved on
them, to the girl they wanted to go steady with. When Howie went out and bought
one, Sondra forgot the resolution that she had made two years earlier not to
criticize her cousin.

“What’s that for?” Sondra asked
suspiciously the first time she saw him at school with the silver bracelet
around his wrist.

“I just wanted one,” Howie answered with a
shrug.

But later, in the lunchroom, Sondra saw
him sitting with one of the ninth-grade cheerleaders and fingering his bracelet
as he smiled at the girl.

“Are you going to ask Alice to go steady?”
Sondra demanded of him when they met in sixth hour biology. The two were lab
partners and could whisper together unnoticed.

“What’s it to you?” Howie responded.

“She’s not Jewish.”

“Who here is Jewish besides you and me?”

“No one,” Sondra had to admit.

“Maybe you just want to study while you’re
in high school, but I want to have a good time, too ”

“Fine, fine,” Sondra suddenly remembered
her resolution. “I’m sorry for sticking my nose in your business. I just know
how everyone was so upset when Brenda married out.”

“I’m not Brenda and I’m not going to marry
out.”

“Okay,”

Sondra let it go, but when she returned
home an hour later, Helga could see that something was troubling her daughter.
She put aside her books and was ready to be a sympathetic ear.

“It’s Howie,” Sondra said with a sigh as
she settled herself on the ledge of the kitchen window. “He’s changing and
doing the stupid things the other kids do.”

“What stupid things?” Helga asked calmly.

Sondra described the ID bracelets, shaking
her head. She wasn’t sure what bothered her most; that Howie was thinking about
dating a non-Jew or that he was starting to date anybody when he was only
fourteen years old. In most of the childhood classics she had grown up with
none of the girls ever went steady. They didn’t even think about boys until
they were much older. Then they usually ended up marrying the boy they had
grown up with, like Peter and Heidi in the book. By rights she should marry
Howie, but he was her cousin and cousins didn’t get married nowadays.

“You never went steady with anybody when
you were my age, did you?” Sondra

demanded of her mother.

“I didn’t go to school when I was your
age,” Helga reminded her daughter gently.

“I
forgot,” Sondra responded hastily. “I’m sorry.”

Fortunately, Helga stayed calm. “You
didn’t make me stop going to school. It was a long time ago anyway.”

“Well, I think the way you and Daddy met
is like a fairy tale.”

“Your father certainly was like a knight
in shining armor to me.”

No matter how many times Sondra heard the
story of her parent’s romance, she never tired of it. Not that it was a story
of how they met. They had known each other always, growing up in the same small
village. Helga and Lotte had been best friends and Julius had never really
noticed his little sister’s playmate except to tease her or pull her braids. He
left Mafdner when she was twelve and came back to Germany with the United
States Army eight years later. He had a few days’ pass and came back to the
village to see if he could find out anything about the others from the village
and, of course, the Torah. Helga had come there from the DP camps to try and
discover if any of her family had survived.

Julius always described how he saw Helga
from afar and would not have recognized her at all except for the defiant way
she held her chin. Helga always said that she recognized him immediately. Of
course, he hadn’t been in the camps. Together they went to Helga’s home and
found that it had been stripped bare.

That evening Julius had gone to the
burgermeister. Old Hans Richter, with his bald, red head that matched his
pulpous red nose, had been the head of the village before the Nazis, during the
time of the Nazis, and after the Nazis. He swore up and down he had only done
what he had been forced to do, but Julius knew better. Wearing his army
uniform, Julius had handed him a list of things Helga needed and told Richter
to get them for her. According to Julius, the burgermeister had scanned the
list and looked back at Julius.

“Where am I supposed to get all these
things?” he had whined.

“The people who helped you destroy the
homes and synagogue can help you.”

“But I have to be out in the field first
thing tomorrow morning to gather in the hay.”

At that point something snapped in Julius.
Perhaps it was the shock of seeing the

Jewish cemetery in ruins
that morning. Maybe it was seeing his kid sister’s best chum an orphan.
Whatever the reason, Julius lost his temper. He pulled out his .45, and stuck
it in the man’s gut. “You have everything here by tomorrow!”

Even after hearing the story so many
times, it was hard for Sondra to imagine her father so furious. Unlike Uncle
Herbert, who lost his temper about once a week, Sondra could count on one hand
the number of times she had seen her father angry.

Still, the mayor had been sufficiently intimated
by the Jewish soldier that he had everything on the list ready the following
day. Julius made arrangements for Helga to go to America and stay with his
parents. By the time he got out of the army and came home, Helga had put on
weight and grown more hair, and he fell in love with her. They were married and
moved into their own home. Helga had hoped to fill it with lots of children
but, now, after six miscarriages over the years, she regarded Sondra as her
miracle.

“Sondra,” she spoke softly. “you and Howie
are cousins and good friends, but you

have to realize Howie has a
much different personality than yours. He doesn’t have your strength of
character.” Helga held up her hand to stem her daughter’s protest.“He can’t handle being different and will
always want to be part of the crowd.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Sondra spoke resentfully.
She had confided in her mother, and now Helga had spoiled it with her
criticisms of Howie. It seemed that, lately, her mother was always saying the
wrong things.

Later, when she was doing her homework,
Sondra thought over the conversation with Howie. She did not want to nothing
but study for the next four years, but she was not sure what else she wanted to
do. There were all sorts of school clubs she could join such as language clubs,
Future Homemakers, Future Teachers the Chess Club, to name a few, but they all
sounded boring. She was still on the newspaper staff, but that was almost like
studying. Jane went to a lot of parties on the weekends with her church youth
group, but that wasn’t for Sondra. She thought about doing volunteer work at
the hospital. However, she had a squeamish stomach. Besides, while that might
be a nice thing to do, it wasn’t for fun. Sondra wondered how Bernice had
gotten through her high school years and agreed with Uncle Simon that it was a
shame she and Robert were living in Philadelphia.

The next day at school Alice,
was wearing Howie’s ID bracelet. For the ninth graders at Lincoln High “going
steady” meant that they ate lunch together, walked together from class to
class, sometimes holding hands, and went to the school dances together. Most
couples went steady for about a month and then “broke up”. Sondra looked at
Howie and Alice sitting next to each other in the lunchroom and wondered how
long they would last. She was feeling more than a little resentful when Jane
sat down next to her.

“I’ve got a great idea!”

“What?” Sondra turned gratefully to her
friend, happy to have a diversion.

“Let’s join the drama club.”

“Can we?”

Jane nodded her head and opened her bag of
chips. “I spoke to Carla Brooks and she said the freshmen can’t do any acting,
but that there was a lot more to a production than the actors. They need us to
work back stage, paint scenery, gather props, and fix costumes. If we like it,
we can take drama as one of our electives next year. What do you think?” Jane
held the bag out to Sondra.

“I can’t really see myself on stage,”
Sondra hesitated as she took a handful of Fritos, “but it sounds like it would
be really fun to be backstage.”

It was! Sondra loved the teamwork involved
in transforming a plain wooden stage and simple high school students into a
whole new reality. There were two other freshman girls who joined the club,
Christine Barnes and Joy Charles. Christine was from a large farm north of town
where she lived with her grandparents. Tall and blonde, she was a classic
beauty but shy. Joy had long, black hair and clear, light skin. She would have
looked like Snow White, Sondra thought, if she didn’t have a weight problem.
Neither Christine nor Joy was into dating, and the four girls spent a lot of
time hanging out together, having fun.

Between sports practice, student council,
dating, and studying, Howie had little time for his cousin. Sondra watched him
break up with Alice, give his ID bracelet to another girl, break up with her,
and quickly find another girl to go steady with. One afternoon, Sondra
overheard her mother and Aunt Irene discussing Howie’s girlfriends.

“It’s so silly, this going steady,” Aunt
Irene laughed. “Where can they go? Herbert carpools Howie and his latest
girlfriend to the dance and the girl’s father picks up. It’s ridiculous. When I
was in high school, the boy borrowed his father’s car to pick up the girl.”

“So none of the boys dated until they were
sixteen?” Helga asked.

Irene shook her head. “Only if they walked
somewhere. I would have been embarrassed to have my date’s father pick me up.
Herbert can’t stand it. Howie and the girl sit in the back seat and the girl
just giggles and Howie asks self-conscious. I don’t know what his hurry is
anyway.”

Sondra wondered why her aunt and uncle let
Howie go out if they thought it was so absurd. She didn’t ask, though. She
wanted to stay on good terms with Howie for the Hanukkah party.

In the spring, Mrs. Wiggs, the drama
teacher, chose The Diary of Anne Frank for the play. Backstage rumors
had it that Mrs. Wiggs had once been on Broadway and gave it all up to marry
Mr. Wiggs. It was hard to believe, though. She was so heavy that her forearms
shook like raw bread dough, and Sondra could not imagine her on the stage in
any but the most absurd part. Still, the middle-aged woman knew the theatre and
understood how to get the most out of her students for a professional
production.

Sondra became the unofficial expert on
the Holocaust, winning her the respect of the whole cast. Enthusiastic about
the play, Sondra tried to talk her parents into going to see it until she
discovered that the first performance would be on the same Friday night as the
monthly services. Sondra did not know what to do. She had been disappointed in
Howie for choosing the dances over the services, but that had been a regular
thing. She would only be missing once. Everyone missed services once in a
while.

“You do what you have to do,” Mrs. Wiggs
spoke kindly when Sondra told her about her dilemma. “We sure would like to
have you here, but we can cover for you if you need.”

Jane had overheard the conversation and
was skeptical. “She’s just saying that to be nice. She wouldn’t want anyone to
think she’s an anti-Semite, especially if she’s putting on The Diary of Anne
Frank.”

There was no use asking Howie his advice.
Sondra knew he would tell her to forget the services. Her parents gave her
their permission to skip one month, but Sondra still hesitated.

For as long as she could remember, Sondra
had been taught that she was special because she was Jewish. She knew that she
was different, but she really did not understand why. Her cousin Brenda had
been different, too, but she crossed the line. What had kept Bernice form
crossing the line? What, she wondered, would keep her and Howie from marrying
out? Their kosher homes? The Hanukkah parties? The Passover seder? Family ties?
Perhaps it was the monthly services. Sondra was afraid if she missed one month,
it would be easier to miss the next month, and who knew where it would lead?

That Sunday, Aunt Lotte and her family
came in for the day and everyone gathered at Frayda’s house. As usual, the men
assembled in the dining room, the women in the living room, and the children
were on the front porch. When Oscar arrived he spent a few minutes inside and
then returned to the porch.

“How are you all doing?” He visited with
the youngsters for a bit and then asked Sondra to take a walk with him. They
headed out back, past the vegetable garden.

“Your Opa sure loved his garden,” Oscar
remarked.

“Uh-hum,” Sondra agreed. “It’s hard for
Oma to keep up with it, but Howie, Lisa, and I try to help out.”

“You do,” Oscar nodded his head as he
studied the garden for a while. “You are good kids,” he continued. “Real good
kids. Your dad was talking to me about your predicament yesterday.”

“Yeah,” Sondra waited for Oscar to
proceed.

“Well, I think you should know that there are
going to be services twice in May.”

“Twice?” Sondra asked. “Why?”

“The normal Shabbos one and a special one
for Shavuos.”

“Really?” Sondra brightened. “Then I can
work on the play and still go to Shavous services. Thank you, Oscar.” She planted
a kiss on her cousin’s cheek and practically skipped as they made their way
back to the house.

“Do you really think that the monthly
services are that important?” Howie asked seriously after Sondra had explained
her solution to him. She just nodded her head.

“Maybe,” Howie responded. “I’ll make more
of an effort to go. I’ve kind of missed them.”

Sondra's dimple deepened with her smile
and inside she felt she could fly from happiness.

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Emunah, faith in God, does not mean believing only good things will happen; it means believing that whatever God does is for the best. I wrote these words at a time when drive-by shootings and suicide bombers had become almost weekly, if not daily, tragedies. Now, more than ten years later, the words are no less true. Whatever HaShem does is for the best. It is my hope to post articles, advice, and homey stories everyweekwhich will reinforce this fact. And now, a special thanks to:

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About Me

Born in Wichita, Kansas, I became a Baalat Teshuva, newly religious, in Phoenix, Arizona while attending ASU. After twelve years of marriage my husband and I made Aliyah with five children and settled in Shilo in the heart of Israel. Two more children joined the family as have daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, Baruch HaShem. My favorite past times are learning, sewing, hiking, reading, cooking, baking, enjoying my family and friends, and, of course, writing. My first novel, Sondra’s Search, was published in 2007 and I am working on the sequel.